Web Design 101 - First Period

I am, by my own admission, a lousy web designer.

Why? - Because I hate templates.

The first website I saw was made by Microsoft's FrontPage 97. All you had to do was tell it: Make me a corporate web! - and FrontPage would dutifully generate homepage, about us, products, and services, and contact pages. Poof! A small company was IBM.
The title of the page was in a box at the top, and all the structural tags - H1, H2, etc. - were colored, sized, and decorated for you. In most templates, it even gave you little graphics for unordered lists.
All you had to do was fill in the blanks, and you were a working company on the Web.
It was a raving bore in 94; and it's only more today. (Not a great poet, either, you'll notice.)

One of the first rules of web design is to make your pages look pretty much the same. The idea is that you won't confuse your visitors, and maybe even establish your corporate or personal style.
That was find in those days if your sense of style is either blue jeans or polyester slacks.
Problem was, that layout implied a company had to have Products and Services. Some companies didn't. That alone created a sense of insecurity or desperation.

Design the information to express

I've never been much of one to put things in little boxes. Design should express and enhance, not restrict.

I tend to want to design a website page by page to reflect the present attitude of the company. If it's a small company that just got a new logo done, then let's let it fill half of space above the fold. Why not? This is company just coming into its own.
They're proud of their new logo. It's all over their vans, new business cards and new company literature. Put it out there for the world to see!
They've only got a few services, but those services are needed in their area. Their customers like them. One of them said so right in the middle of the home page.
Just put a list on the side full of links to get more info.

A design like that gets poo-poo'd a lot. Even customers don't like it because they don't think it looks "business-like". (Not that anyone has ever defined "business-like" too well.) It becomes a matter of latent expectations, not perceiving.

Why does a web page have to follow the pattern of a business letter? Why not let it be a presentation right from the homepage? You got a new company, tell the world about it.
You can always add or adjust stuff later.
It has to look like a business letter because customers won't know what to do. Or, It has to look like a business letter because that's what this site looks like. (The one I'd like to be...)

Wired wonders
Wired proposed over a decade ago that we use the web space better. (I lost track of the article or I'd provide a link.)
Web pages only had to show a window into the content. It's what they do anyway. There could be content spread wide and far across thousands of pixels of space. One click, and the viewport shifted to another part of the grandscape.
They were far ahead of their time.

Web pages in those days were constrained by download speeds on 33k and 56k modems. If a webpage had more than 30K of content - images, programming, and HTML - visitors just went somewhere else.
The download time has changed a little with the spread of broadband, but the size limitation for templates still holds them below 60K. And all of it has to fit on a business letter, within two clicks down the sidebar.

The article proposed broad, bold colors. Wide colored channels guided the visitor across the webscape to explore information or make a purchase. The user actually interacted with the page instead of just clicking away.
Changing colors in the viewscape indicated where the visitor was in the process. All the information was contained on the page, so there was no need for flickering screens. The body tag encompassed many pages, really viewports, of the viewscape. If the visitor wanted, they could ramble around without following the colored guide lanes - and take the path less followed.
Using a mouse or the arrow keys, they could go anywhere just like exploring a landscape on Google Earth. Zoom in or out to get their bearings, then off to explore again.
I don't imagine such a site would have a problem with stickiness...

Where does all of this fit into SEO and SEM? That's going to be a topic or two for another time.

The plan in those days long ago was to use Javascript and Java to implement responsiveness and new content on demand. That can still be done, of course, but there are much more exciting options now. (continued later)

SEO/SEM in Australia is a special issue for so many reasons. Join me was we explore. It will be a fascinating and informative journey. Sphere: Related Content